Kirk Franklin’s Hero and Mary Mary’s Mary Mary continue at the
top of the charts because, frankly, there’s just not much out
there. And what is out there is, in large measure, dull,
recycled cliché. When you package a CD, you line up a bunch of
beats and hope you have a hit. By contrast, when you make an
album, you bleed. You bleed all over yourself. Which might
explain why the best urban Gospel albums of the year are a
spiritual album by a secular artist (India.Arie), and a secular
album by a Christian artist (Tonéx). My, how I long for the old
days when God actually inspired art. My, how I hope the next
twelve months are more inspiring than the past twelve.

The
best Gospel album of the year

isn’t a Gospel album at all. The luminous India.Arie’s
Testimony: Vol. 1, Life & Relationship is a poignant and joyful
affirmation of our humanity, our responsibility to God and
ourselves and each other. It gently condemns selfishness and
materialism and sexism and classism while being both funny and
heartbreaking at the same time. Arie takes real risks here,
revealing much of herself and her private life in her preaching.
She inspires and enlightens us without judging, without
condemnation. She makes us want to change the way we think.
Change the way we live. That, by definition, is what Gospel
music should do. That, by definition, is what 90% of Gospel
albums produced these days fail to do.

The other great album of the year is an album that’s more than
two years old. 2004’s Life, perhaps the defining work of Tye
Tribbett’s career is also one of the defining works of urban
Gospel music itself. While somewhat derivative of D’Angelo’s
groundbreaking Brown Sugar, Tribbett’s absolute ice cool and
steely resolve was melded with an off-kilter set of human
dreadlocks called Greater Anointing whose animated tribal antics
were set at a dissonant counterpoint to Tye’s unabashed urban
romanticizing, yielding a milestone industry recording, a shot
heard, quite literally, around the world. From the stone cool of
“Superstar” to the incendiary hypnotism of “I Can Make It,”
Tribbett made perhaps the most overtly sexual R&B album in
Gospel music history. It was actually something that was and
remains sorely needed for the Christian community, a Gospel
album for the bedroom. Christian couples (ideally, married
Christian couples) are routinely forced to put on secular music
when the candles get lit. Christians routinely separate romance
and intimacy from spirituality, which is like having a huge
security hole in your Internet connection or leaving for
vacation with all of your windows open. Many couples are saved
and sanctified until bedtime, when out comes all manner of
ungodly messages in worldly music. But, seriously, who wants to
make love while Dorothy Norwood is hollering in the background?

Tribbett’s Life, I guarantee you, remains in high rotation in
Christian bedrooms across the country. And there’s a good reason
for it. First and foremost, it’s a fabulously written and
produced work. It has God’s anointing on it. And it never
compromises the Gospel itself. Rather, Life presents the Gospel
in such an unusual and unexpected fashion, the listener
literally doesn’t know what to expect one track to the next. And
Tribbett never got in the way of the message itself. The
stripped-down minimalist arrangements and funky flourishes only
sharpened his focus on that which is most important—sharing
Christ with others.

This year, Tribbett suffers from the sophomore jinx, wherein
artists struggle to follow up a popular album. That this year’s
Victory debuted at number one on Billboard’s Gospel charts is
more a testament to the raw power of Life, and to our hopes and
expectations for its follow-up, than it is to Victory itself.
Here Tribbett trades in his incendiary and daring bedroom
crooning for a loud, preppy, sexually confused look.

I think I know what Tye Tribbett was going for with his CD
cover, but the image misses the mark badly. First, brown is
never a good idea for a cover of anything except, maybe, Hershey
bars. It tends to vanish into the racks, and the
indistinguishable photo montage inside the “V” for “victory”
doesn't help since the “V” is cropped at top and bottom such
that it take a minute to realize, “Oh, I get it. It's the letter
“V.”

Then there's Tye himself. I'm struggling for words here,
wondering who on earth approved this ghastly photo. He looks
positively freakish (and seriously gay, sorry. Which is ironic
considering he jolts us out of the title track by tossing in a
little gay bashing for no apparent reason. Well, not apparent
other than that gay bashing is so en vogue these days). Maybe he
was going for whimsical, I don't know. And maybe, with his new
CD sitting atop Billboard's Gospel charts and finally dislodging
Kirk Franklin, Tribbett might be seeing the beginning stages of
Big Head Disease, where people around him start telling him only
things he wants to hear. Somebody should have loved him enough
to tell him how inexplicably ugly this album cover is. Gone is
the D'Angelo cool of his breakout hit Life. With Victory,
Tribbett moves swiftly towards the center lane, heading for the
big bucks DMZ currently occupied by Kurt (Angry Moose) Carr.
Fun, aerobic praise and worship stuff dominates the disc, with
fairly little of the mystery and edginess of Life.

Victory disappoints mainly in that it doesn't break new ground
or reveal new levels of craft, which is what we'd come to expect
of Tribbett. The live stuff seems to suffer from the same brassy
overcompression as Tonéx's Out The Box, which makes it a little
hard to listen to after awhile.

I'm real sure Tribbett's #1 success owes as much to momentum as
to the quality of this offering. We were wowed by Life, so many
of us just bought the thing on spec. To give Tribbett credit, he
did not fall prey to the same sophomore trap that mortally
wounded Smokie Norful (whose second album was a failed attempt
to clone the first). Here Tribbett veers far and away from Life
rather than attempting to duplicate it. Unfortunately, he's
veered into the cash lane, perhaps winning more fans, but losing
this one. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here, I suppose
somebody told him he needs to reinvent himself with every album,
but many people rushed to buy Victory expecting Life Part 2.
What they got instead was a perfectly good album that was not
particularly unique or groundbreaking.

Which probably won’t matter. Most people buy things simply on
inertia. Once you’ve made a positive impression with an
audience, you’re in the club, which means people will just buy
your albums. Kirk Franklin hasn’t put out a good (or original or
anointed) album in years, but his stuff goes immediately to
number one. People just buy his stuff. Why? Because he’s Kirk
Franklin, that’s why. I’ve been told Hero, Franklin’s latest, is
a very good album. I couldn’t tell you because I find Franklin
himself so reprehensible a human being that, for me, he is the
living embodiment of everything that’s wrong about the Gospel
music industry and the black church: the ego, the arrogance, the
unoriginality; qualities Jesus Himself never manifested. When I
see people who call themselves Christians acting exactly like
the world—in temperament, in competitiveness, in ego—to me, it
says these people are lost. The anointing and genuineness that
electrified his earlier work is for the most part replaced by
lame commerciality.

And it came to pass, when the priests were come out of the
holy place: (for all the priests that were present were sanctified,
and did not then wait by course: 12 Also the Levites which were the
singers, all of them of Asaph, of Heman, of Jeduthun, with their
sons and their brethren, being arrayed in white linen, having
cymbals and psalteries and harps, stood at the east end of the
altar, and with them an hundred and twenty priests sounding with
trumpets:) 13 It came even to pass, as the trumpeters and singers
were as one, to make one sound to be heard in praising and thanking
the LORD; and when they lifted up their voice with the trumpets and
cymbals and instruments of musick, and praised the LORD, saying, For
he is good; for his mercy endureth for ever: that then the house was
filled with a cloud, even the house of the LORD; 14 So that the
priests could not stand to minister by reason of the cloud: for the
glory of the LORD had filled the house of God. —2 Chronicles 5:11-14